On Saturday, May 25th, 2024 Tablet Command released Tablet Command 3.7.3 to the App Store. This is a priority release to fix an Esri map loading bug that can cause Tablet Command to hang or freeze.  We recommend that all users update this release as soon as possible.

Tablet Command 

• Fix for Esri map loading issue that can cause the app to hang.

Actions

We recommend that all users update Tablet Command to version 3.7.3, as this issue with the Esri SDK has been present in releases dating back to 2023. For reasons currently unknown, it only became an active problem recently.

Details

In the interest of transparency and to answer some of your questions, we wanted to detail our process for identifying, troubleshooting, and addressing this urgent issue.

Three weeks ago, Tablet Command received occasional reports of the application hanging or freezing. Over this period, customer-provided iOS crash logs indicated that the issue was caused by a process in the Esri SDK taking too long to execute, prompting the iOS watchdog to suspend Tablet Command. As a result, users experienced “freezing” or “hanging” and had to force quit and relaunch the app. However, the specific process within the Esri SDK causing the issue remained unclear.

Our team attempted to replicate the issue but only succeeded on Friday afternoon last week. Once we could reliably replicate the issue across multiple versions of iOS, we reported our findings to Esri and began working on a solution. We provided Esri with a basic application that loaded maps using the standard SDK method, demonstrating that the bug was unrelated to the Tablet Command code.  Esri has acknowledged the bug in their SDK and confirmed its presence in releases dating back to early 2023. They currently do not understand why the issue has become problematic now and not earlier.

Recognizing that Esri might take several weeks or longer to resolve the issue, our team implemented a workaround in Tablet Command and tested it internally throughout the week. By Friday, we completed our testing to ensure we had addressed the issue without introducing any new problems. We submitted Tablet Command 3.7.3 to the App Store for review on Friday afternoon, and it was approved early this morning.

Under normal circumstances, we would not release an app update on a holiday weekend with such short notice. However, this issue is a high priority due to its significant operational impact, causing the app to freeze and leaving users unaware that it was no longer working. Therefore, we decided to prioritize this release and make it immediately available to all users.

As always, please reach out to our team at support@tabletcommand.com with any questions or for assistance.